Various surgical procedures are routinely carried out intravascularly or intraluminally. For example, in the treatment of vascular disease, such as arteriosclerosis, it is a common practice to access the artery and insert an instrument (e.g., a balloon or other type of catheter) to carry out a procedure within the artery. Such procedures usually involve the percutaneous puncture of the artery so that an insertion sheath can be placed in the artery and thereafter instruments (e.g., catheter) can pass through the sheath and to an operative position within the artery. Intravascular and intraluminal procedures unavoidably present the problem of stopping the bleeding at the percutaneous puncture after the procedure has been completed and after the instruments (and any insertion sheaths used therewith) have been removed. Bleeding from puncture sites, particularly in the case of femoral arterial punctures, is typically stopped by utilizing vascular closure devices, such as those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,045,569; 6,090,130; 7,597,705; 7,618,436, 7,749,248; 7,837,705; 7,931,670, and related patents and patent applications, all of which are hereby incorporated by reference.
Typical closure tools or devices such as the ones described in the above-mentioned patents and patent applications place a sealing plug at the tissue puncture site. Successful deployment of the sealing plug requires that it be ejected from within a device sheath into the incision or puncture tract and tamped down to an outer surface of the tissue puncture using a tamping tube (also called a compaction tube). In a manually operated tool, the tamping procedure cannot commence until the device sheath (within which the tamping tube is located) has been removed so as to expose the tamping tube for manual grasping. The tamping tube is manually grasped and tamped against the sealing plug, setting the sealing plug within the incision or puncture tract, against an outer surface of the tissue puncture. In an automatic tamping system, the closure tool can have an automatic driving mechanism for automatically tamping the sealing plug within the incision or puncture tract toward the outer surface of the tissue puncture. The closure tool can have a tamping tube disposed adjacent to the sealing plug, such that the tamping tube is driven by the automatic driving mechanism to tamp the sealing plug into the desired placement.
Under certain conditions, the force used to tamp the sealing plug may not be controlled to the desired extent and the sealing plug may not be tamped into the desired placement; potentially, the sealing plug may be tamped too forcefully resulting in over-compaction of the sealing plug within the incision or puncture tract, or extension of the sealing plug into the artery lumen. Accordingly, there is a need for improving the mechanism for deployment of the sealing plug at the site of a tissue puncture and improving control of the amount of force exerted upon the sealing plug.